[ Federal lawmakers failed to increase the minimum wage, but US
workers made other gains, and they are setting their sights on new
goals. But across the country, states and companies have raised wages
in the wake of Fight for $15’s efforts.]
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‘THE SUCCESS IS INSPIRATIONAL’: THE FIGHT FOR $15 MOVEMENT 10
YEARS ON  
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Steven Greenhouse
November 23, 2022
The Guardian
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_ Federal lawmakers failed to increase the minimum wage, but US
workers made other gains, and they are setting their sights on new
goals. But across the country, states and companies have raised wages
in the wake of Fight for $15’s efforts. _

NYC Rally and March to raise the minimum wage in America, April 15,
2015, , The All-Nite Images; Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike
2.0

 

Ten years ago next week, 200 fast-food workers walked out at 20 New
York City restaurants, demanding $15 an hour in pay. At the time, many
observers scoffed at $15 as an absurd, pie-in-the-sky demand. As the
movement’s anniversary approaches, the Fight for $15 movement has
proven the naysayers wrong.

Congress has failed to increase the federal minimum wage, which has
been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009. But across the country, states
and companies have raised wages in the wake of Fight for $15’s
efforts. While, for many, $15 an hour is still too low, the increases
have been especially important in the current era of rising inflation.

Twelve states and Washington DC have adopted a $15 minimum
[[link removed]] hourly
wage, although in many states it’s being phased in. Even deep-red
Nebraska has embraced a $15 minimum
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while Hawaii has approved an impressive $18 minimum
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be phased in between now and 2028.

“The movement’s success is inspirational,” said Yannet Lathrop,
a policy analyst at the National Employment Law Project. “It has
helped 26 million workers
[[link removed]] across
the US win $150bn per year in additional pay. Its impact for workers
of color is significant. About 12 million workers of color have
benefited and their additional earnings are $76bn a year.” For
workers whose wages rose, this means an average raise of roughly
$6,000 a year.

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) helped create and
underwrite the Fight for $15 movement because it believed that the US
was paying far too little attention to the plight of low-wage workers.
Fight for $15 began in New York and relied on a series of one-day
strikes that inspired fast-food workers in other cities.
It ultimately expanded to staging strikes in 340 US cities
[[link removed]] on
the movement’s fourth anniversary in 2016.

“The key accomplishment was that the Fight for $15, which was led by
black, brown and immigrant workers all across the country, taught all
workers that when you join together you can make changes in your jobs
and in your lives,” Mary Kay Henry, the SEIU’s president, told the
Guardian.

“Twenty-six million workers have seen their wages go up to $15. That
is a standard that was scoffed at when it started, but that standard
is now getting challenged for demands for an ever-higher minimum,
which is a real indicator of success.”

“The Fight for $15”, Henry added, “has changed the way the
country thinks about wages, the way elected officials think about
wages, and the way economists think about wages.”

Frances Holmes, a fast-food worker in St Louis, Missouri, is glad that
her pay has jumped from $7.75 an hour a decade ago to $15 today. “I
was able to move from an apartment to a house,” she said. “I was
able to afford to buy bacon again, but it’s still a struggle living
on $15. They don’t give you enough hours to work each week. Our
biggest hope is to have a union. That would help us get more money and
more hours.”

Not all of the campaign’s initial aims have panned out. Its original
goal was “$15 and a union”, and while it has racked up major
successes in raising wages, it has failed to unionize any fast-food
workers. One reason is that its pressure campaign against McDonald’s
has not gotten the fast-food giant to agree not to oppose unionization
efforts.

“The Fight for $15 has lifted up the whole issue of the pathetic
state of the minimum wage,” said Ruth Milkman, a sociologist at the
City University of New York’s School of Labor and Urban Studies.
“In terms of pushing the envelope to make the utopian real, it was
extremely successful, at least in blue cities and states.”

“As for its stated goal of ‘$15 and a union’,” Milkman added,
“the second half of that has not taken place.” She said the
movement’s assumption that it could get the federal government to
declare that heavily franchised companies like McDonald’s were joint
employers “turned out to be wrong”. If the government considered
McDonald’s to be a joint employer with its franchisees, it would
make it far easier for employees of the fast-food giant to unionize
and win contracts that would cover many of its locations, rather than
having to negotiate many individual contracts with individual
franchisees.

“It’s pretty tough to unionize in the fast-food sector without the
joint employer thing,” Milkman said.

With their successes on the wage front and lack of success on the
unionization front, workers and strategists behind Fight for $15 are
trying to figure out their next steps. One ambitious new initiative
has been to set up a new group, the Union of Southern Service Workers,
to help workers across the southern region of the US, where the Fight
for $15 movement has had the least success in getting employers and
states to raise pay.

Last weekend, more than 100 fast-food, retail, healthcare, warehouse
and other workers from the south’s service economy met in Columbia,
South Carolina, to launch this new, non-traditional union
[[link removed]]. The organizers said the
effort would seek to unite “workers across workplaces plagued by low
pay, high turnover and a legacy of racism”.

Terrence Wise, a Taco Bell worker and Fight for $15 leader who
attended the South Carolina meeting that founded the new union, said:
“We’re going to do whatever it takes: go on strike, do civil
disobedience, do union elections, target the employer in any way
possible. That’s what’s unique about this. It’s across different
industries.

“We know that wages are lowest in the south, and we know the history
of the south: slavery, plantations, union-busting,” Wise continued.
“Racial inequality is baked into the country and especially the
southern states. We know we can win in California and New York.
Don’t you want to take the fight where it’s hardest to win, where
it’s most challenging? That means the south.”

This new union may push for union elections at nursing homes in
Mississippi or stage protests at Amazon warehouses in Georgia over
safety problems there.

Wise said another goal of the South Carolina meeting was to help
develop new leaders, people like Lizett Aguilar, a McDonald’s worker
in Los Angeles. Aguilar said the biggest effect of Fight for $15 for
her hasn’t been that her pay rose to $16 an hour from $8.50 a decade
ago, but that “the Fight for $15 has helped me lose my fear about
speaking out against injustice”. Aguilar has helped lead marches and
knocked on legislators’ doors to win passage of California’s
Assembly Bill 257
[[link removed]] (AB
257), which has set up a type of sectoral bargaining for more than
550,000 California fast-food workers to help them get raises and
reduce wage theft and sexual harassment.

Fight for $15 leaders say their movement helped inspire the union
drives at Starbucks
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some activists say the Fight for $15 movement should seek to help the
unionization wave grow faster and further by copying the Starbucks
campaign and pushing to unionize hundreds of McDonald’s restaurants,
despite the lack of joint employer status.

But some Fight for $15 leaders don’t see that as a formula for
success. SEIU president Henry said: “Bargaining store by store in a
franchised industry is not going to give workers the power they need.
That’s why we will fight to pass legislation like AB 257 in other
states.”

Terrence Wise feels considerable pride when he hears that Bank of
America announced a $15 minimum wage in 2017 and a $22 minimum wage
recently
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“Whenever I hear about wages being increased – just the other week
in Nebraska, or when we hear about Starbucks workers forming a union
or Amazon workers challenging Jeff Bezos – that kind of change is
real, and we know it was inspired by the Fight for $15 and those
workers in New York City walking out 10 years ago,” Wise said.

_[STEVEN GREENHOUSE is a journalist and author, focusing on labour and
the workplace.]_

_With so much on the line, journalism that relentlessly reports the
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you. [[link removed]]_

* Fight For 15
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* Fight for $15
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* Minimum Wage
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* $15 Minimum Wage
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* Labor Movement
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* Trade Unions
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* Labor Organizing
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* low wage workers
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* Fast Food Workers
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* Starbucks
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* Starbucks Workers United
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* McDonald's
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* Union of Southern Service Workers
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* SEIU
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